The sobering reality of our times is that there seems to be no escape from reality itself. The global democratic systems of how we organise ourselves politically have mockingly laid bare the inadequacies of our political lives. The fact that people do not decide their futures, that it is the interests of the global elite that continue to be implemented across the board comes not as a surprise but is thoroughly infuriating especially with confirmation from the likes of populists like Trump. There used to be a reasoning couched in democratic/egalitarian ideals that justified the most brutal injustices done by the global political order but that is not the case anymore. There are no more cold comforts.
This is also why sporting events become significant carnival events specifically for the political appeal involved. Take the FIFA World Cup 2026. This world cup ran through one of its worst campaigns as it also tells a story of how one of the top national teams in the sport, Argentina, arguably became one of the most hated teams in the world. The numerous calls that went favorably for the team and also the opponents that they faced and how they played their "natural game" have all come under the scanner. And there are direct political controversies both on and off the field that led to this development, but there is more to what meets the eye here. To recall the well-known aphorism: “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”, becomes relevant in this context. There is an inversion to this in liberal democracy: “Injustice must be done, but it must not be seen to be done”. This is how events in liberal democracies become carnivals because the original aphorism replaces the inversion here, in the case of football for 90 minutes or so. Here questions of ethics or morality can be managed or resolved on the ground using match referees along with their digital counterparts. There is an on the ground inspection for any actions that go against the spirit of the sport and also technological aids that can go back and take decisions on certain actions on the ground. Therefore, fairness becomes important to the sport here. And this fairness becomes an involved process for the spectators too, more so interesting and effective than in real-world political scenarios.
Now there was arguably an active interference that gave the unfair advantage to Argentina that seemed to be working against the spirit of the carnival since fairness is inaccurately considered to be encoded into the carnival. This is the crucial inversion: we assume the carnival guarantees fairness because it has referees and VAR, but the carnival's function was never to deliver justice — only to perform the seeing of it. Argentina's advantage didn't break the carnival; it exposed what the carnival was actually for. In actuality, world cups or football in general offer no excesses that the carnival situation can’t account for. Therefore, the appearances of carnivals becoming the event should be read as the most identifiable carnival character in liberal democracies where Palestine, race, and all political questions can be easily navigated to an extent, divorced from the real material political realities.
This logic is exactly what prompted me to write a paper on piracy that considers it as not an excess but an activity within the chain of cultural distributive apparatus. Yes, the Indian condition tends to be unique with the arbitrary actions of the censor board, facilitated by the Hindu nationalist spirit that limits access to films along with a disappearing market for physical media. But it is never something that questions the commercial distributive logic of the market. Instead, it manages to fulfil these logics appearing as an event, when in reality, it stops at being the carnival.
Writing this paper back in 2024 was a personalised academic experience to me. To write about stuff that you are into in academia is not a luxury that everyone has. And the inspiration for it was a trip I took to Beemappally back in 2022. Beemappally’s bootlegged CD market had been infamous for the police raids and controversies surrounding pirate products. In Beemappally, piracy doesn’t limit itself to media, but rather offers an expansive market of second hand goods and cheap knockoffs. In other words, Beemappally offered me a point of entry into this diverse informal bazaar economy (Ravi Sundaram) that I was trying to understand.
Also, I still remember the guy, Naseer, who gave me a tour of the whole pirate facility (not everything was for public viewing, of course). To be honest, I expected some resistance from the pirate practitioners in Beemappally since piracy is supposed to be “illegal” and I was an outsider supposedly asking the wrong questions. But they were very welcoming, especially Naseer, as I explained my interest in the subject.
I was told that there remains a group of people, even though small in number, who still consider themselves as core consumers of physical media. Of course, this is not because they decided to single handedly save the physical disc from obsolescence. But mainly because they are used to the old ways, according to Naseer. But one thing I really admired was the CD covers. They had brilliant artwork and the effort that was put into creating them really surprised me. Even if they are “fakes”, they are supposed to be “real”, just like our political lives in liberal democracy.
So, cut to 2026, my paper on piracy after going through, idk, 10-20 drafts, finally gets published in a reputed journal. The fact remains that the Beemappally experience remains a core memory associated with the writing of this paper. But the irony is that the paper is not about Beemappally. It survives there only as one or two passing references. And maybe that's fitting: Beemappally was never going to hold up as evidence, only as the thing that got me looking. The paper needed other theorists to argue; it needed Naseer to exist at all. Even today, If I go through the saved contacts in my phone, I still have my Beemppally contact from 2022 saved as, ‘Naseer Beemappally’. Of course, I never reached out after that day. But I still have his number. This is of course, not surprising because I do not delete numbers. Strange habit. Don’t ask. And yeah, I don’t know where Naseer is now. This will never reach him since we are never likely to share the same world, even though “we share the same sky” (Aftersun 2022, Dir. Charlotte Wells). But thanks to him and his friends.
If the World Cup and piracy both show injustice managed rather than resolved, the Delhi student protests are the live test of whether that management can be refused. I do not wish to present any radical response to the strategies of the protest, but there are things that I feel that need to be addressed. Here I couldn’t help but think of the 1968 student protests in France. The protests aimed at dismantling the university system that had little breathing space for the students. However, most faculty members also viewed these goals as serving their own interests, not solely those of the students. They found themselves intellectually aligned towards the interests of the students especially in questioning the hierarchies involving student-teacher relationship. Many celebrated writers and academics delivered speeches and also publicly protested along with the students. This is where the Indian case becomes interesting. Indian academics, by and large, haven't shown up the way they are expected to. Where they've mobilized, it has always been around salary revisions, DA, pension — not around the NEP or the legal architecture reshaping the university itself.
Going back to 1968, what started with college students soon escalated into nation-wide protests, strikes by industrial workers. Solidarity with the students did create a moment of crisis, an event, to be precise. This was the most defining moment of 1968. But the revolutionary energies never converged as distrust grew between workers and students. Before everyone knew it, the government was able to manage the crisis, again undermining the event and turning it into a carnival performance.
Right now, the Indian case is sadly not able to elicit lockdowns, strikes from broader workers’ movements. Even the academics haven’t left their positions of comfort. But there are parallel protests happening across the country against illegal displacement, ecological destruction, AI data centres. There’s hope that escalation would offer a convergence of radical energies that would create the event. But the oedipalising forces of family and state still have the upper hand. In India, education for a kid is a family affair, mostly. Parents and family mostly believe their kids would find success if they kept their heads down and grinded hard. But since the old order of statist assurances are slowly getting dismantled, things might change for the better. The different posters appearing in the protests is clearly a symptom of this questioning of the familial matrix.
With the state and liberal democracy, things are a bit different. To be honest, the government is never truly in crisis simply because students protest. Even the Supreme Court can brush off protests, as it has done. But what if the court couldn't ignore a crisis in governance itself? Here, 'crisis' for the government should mean an outright failure to deliver governance. And in order for that to happen, one should understand what Mario Savio meant by 'putting your bodies on the gears.' His point wasn't metaphorical protest — it was that the machine only registers a crisis once it physically cannot run. Democracy can absorb petitions, marches, even outrage; it cannot absorb a stopped machine. Which means the students waiting for their crisis to be recognised have the sequence backwards — the crisis has to be enacted, not announced.
In a democracy the options are clearly limited for the protesting students. Apart from the five-year wait to punish the ruling party, nothing else is possible for a people(s) to challenge the politicians in government. Regarding the ongoing protests, there are already tendencies trying to channel the revolutionary desires into negotiable, familiar demands rather than letting it pursue its own destabilising logic, which would then open up severe limitations of democracy itself. This is what Deleuze and Guattari tried to explain with the ‘68 protests. The capture mechanism will win over the protests; that’s the usual story. We are all addicted to the familiarity that comforts us. We want things to go back to being normal. But there was nothing normal about the past. What is waiting ahead is not the past. Therefore, the struggle towards a really revolutionary stride would depend on our inertia and our willingness to experience the uncertainty in the true political domain. Since the “standard multiparty liberal democracy repeatedly displays its inability to cope with the catastrophic prospects” of climate emergency and rising inequality, one could argue that these catastrophes present itself as real political issues as they will force us to think beyond our normal political mediations (maybe even beyond liberal democracy).
As Slavoj Žižek wrote in his recent book, the lesson one has to learn from the October revolution is precisely a matter of reimagining the core power grids of society. As he writes:
“Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the mechanisms without which state power becomes utterly inoperative. According to legend, the morning after all this took place Trotsky said: ‘OK, the revolution has been achieved, I am tired and I’ll catch some sleep now!’ Lenin and others went on to lead the mobilized masses to fight the police and storm the Winter Palace (performative acts without any real purpose or relevance).”
Trotsky's insight was that state power lives in its infrastructure, not its palaces — the railways and the post office and the Winter Palace becomes theatre. The same logic applies to the infrastructure we're actually dependent on now: not railways, but networks. Instagram and other social media aren't just workarounds for the students — they're a claim that the digital commons is itself a power grid worth contesting, not just a tool for organizing around the real fight elsewhere. Also, newer ways of communication on the ground is now made possible by technological developments like Bitchat and Bridgefy. Instagram has fashionably adopted the protests, memefying different aspects involved. Yes, things look promising as the mounting pressure online might help in raising consciousness, but it cannot alone stage the event for a proper political transformation. For that to happen, alliances and convergences have to happen across class, caste, gender lines opening the political up to the grand staging of the event.
In View
This month, as promised, book recommendations are here.
This book retells the story of how colonial powers interfered in the stillborn digital revolution of India and how it shaped the current IT sector of our country. The history of politics, science, technology, and private entrepreneurship in creating India’s first computer, TIFRAC and how it was undercut by the cold war and its bloc politics comes off as an interesting read, or well, at least to me. Highly recommended if you think about why we as a country are more into software servicing rather than hardware manufacturing like our strong Asian neighbours.
Muskism, as the name suggests. explains Elon Musk, his behavioural anomalies, his history of playing both sides — statist and libertarian. His wealth is now almost valued at close to 800 billion USD. The book takes us through his early years, his early lessons from apartheid Africa and how he infused those lessons into his entrepreneurial thinking. And if you are angry at how inequality rules the world and how some are easily allowed to deepen these inequalities with impunity, then this book is for you, since it elaborates the disturbing symptoms of success in a hyper-capitalist world.
Cinema
Blue Film (2026) offers a daring take on sexuality and identity that shocks one to the core. To present taboo subject matters in an effort to provoke discussion of certain cordoned-off topics works well in this one. I loved the mental self-flagellation, but it gets deeper with the identity crisis that breaks one’s heart towards the ending. Highly recommended if you don’t mind provocations.
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